Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Edition
Authors: by Dave Thomas, David Hansson, Leon Breedt, Mike Clark, James Duncan Davidson, Justin Gehtland, Andreas Schwarz
Amazon info
No, I didn't read the entire book - but hey, this is really a reference book for people who are actually writing code in Rails and I don't have that luxury quite yet.
First, the book is clear, well written, funny and easy to read (and it is extremely well edited - as it all sounded like one writer to me). I didn't go through much of it detail, so take that with a grain of salt. Now, on to Rails itself. This has true promise - what I loved was "convention not configuration". Ever since I started using J2EE I had the sense that everything was a bit overengineered and superflexible at the cost of being hard to learn. For years I have had debates with developers (always "server side" folks) who always want to put in additional layers to provide flexibility "just in case". That always generates systems that are cumbersome to explain, document, and use - and often the flexibility is never used (or the changes that are required are along a different dimension). So, I was thrilled to see all the "magic" of rails. Name things right and all the work is done for you - perhaps limited in some ways, but super fast. Agile programming makes sense in many (but not all) environments - although I thought the author's mythical user was quite unrealistic.
I was getting all excited about Rails when I hit two barriers....
* Ruby - the language used by Rails is just plain strange. Having programmed for over 35 years, I have seen a number of languages and I am sure I could learn Ruby - but it just didn't feel right. Perhaps I am getting old.
* Deployment - oh, this was even worse - as all the environments described assumed you were running UNIX. I grew up at Sun, but this seems like an unreasonable assumption.
What has me even more excited that Ruby on Rails is Grails - which is closer to Groovy on Rails, which is closer to Java on Rails. With support for Hibernate (yay) and Spring (I guess I will have to learn that - although I have always felt Spring is one of those additional layers that provides flexibility that I never actually need).
But I look forward to building some Grails apps - although I don't have any clue as to when it might be (but I know the first one will be allowance tracking).
Recommended: For all programmers